You Have Selected Regicide

So after finally buckling down and truly focusing on the Lich King, over the last few weeks, last night we went in for our last raid of the week before the reset.

Our first attempt took the Lich King all the way to 22%. I was feeling really good, we made some modifications to our strat and got ready for the next attempt, and this is where it started to go down hill…

Our next attempts were consistently met with some miscue by one or multiple raiders, we weren’t moving away from defiles fast enough, or not slowing the valks, not getting off the platform before it fell away, letting a tank die early in phase 2, tanks no repositioning mobs properly. We all had very small mistakes which led to lots of unnecessary wipes. We even had our boomkin get defile, and then he disconnected, resulting in the Defile growing to enormous proportions and wiping us. It seemed everything was against us.

Frustrations were growing, we had already lost our shadow priest at the beginning of the night to his account getting hacked, we replaced him with an arcane mage. At about 10:20pm EST one of our healers (Holy Pally) disconnected. 10 minutes passed by and we thought we would have had to call it, but one of our resto druids logged in after having an unfulfilled evening at the bar and decided to return home, mind you he had little to no experience on the Lich King fight at all but we pulled him in anyway.

First attempt with the new druid in the fight, we wiped in phase 2 due to poor positioning of the boss as compared to defiles.

Then the next attempt came, we breezed through phase 1 and 2, entered into phase 3 and was finally able to put our tweaks into place, moving the Lich King around, using living bomb and starfall on the vile spirits, we saw the LK get to 25% and then 20%. Calls on vent were frantic by our healers for innervate, mana was running low. As the tank on the Lich King, I started to use my cooldowns more liberally, watching the Lich King’s health drop here and there, it was as if time was slowing down watching his health.

I had all my tank buttons pressed, everything was on cooldown, I saw the Lich King’s health it said 12%, I hear on vent from all the healers they are out of mana, I see we have a mage down, then I see our boomkin go down. We pushed on, my finger poised above the health pot button as my last saving button, and then it happened…Lich King to 10%. I yelled out on Vent…”We did it!!!!” Everyone in the raid was dead now and the RP was going on, most people didn’t realize it at first what happened, but then it sunk in, many of us were shaking, my arms were raised up high in triumph.

We had done it, we kept fighting, no one quit on me even when I got frustrated and let it show on vent. I continued to push my team as hard as I could because I believed in every one of them. They are my guild, my raiders, my family. In some way I feel they believed in me as their GM and their Raid Leader to get them through all this and I did. In the end I was the proudest GM I could be that my team was loyal, there with me to the end, and in the end my guild, no…our guild stood triumphant.